Cold Open · Essay · okt 25, 2022

Nobu, Baba & Henk (2022): A Conversation With Sarah Blok & Lisa Konno

Directors Sarah Blok and Lisa Konno bring a fashion-inflected documentary sensibility to the most underrepresented story in immigrant cinema: the father. Their short trilogy — timed to coincide with an exhibition at Dutch Design Week and the release of their accompanying book — strips away the expected immigrant narratives and offers something more tender and honest in its place. In conversation with Kiriko, they discuss why a hybrid form of documentary and fashion filmmaking can reveal more about a subject than a traditional talking-head approach.

By Kiriko Mechanicus

Film Journalist · Celebrating Cinema

Directors Sarah Blok & Lisa Konno join to discuss their short trilogy of non-traditional immigrant story of fathers. With an exhibition at this year’s Dutch Design Week and the release of their book, which you can buy here, we explore how this hybrid form of fashion-stylised documentaries can offer a more intimate portrayal of their subjects. Candidly, Lisa & Sarah share the inspiration behind this project and why they embraced a more honest lens through which they share these stories.

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Sarah Blok is driven by the urge to show people the poetry of what we call ‘everyday life’, she writes and directs stories in different narrative forms: theatre, fiction film and documentary. Her work is about people living in today’s world and therefore inevitably considers the concepts that characterise our age: impact, wokeness, self-development, authenticity and moral superiority.

Lisa Konno is an artist and designer based in Amsterdam. In 2015 she started her practice by making collections from textile waste that made statements about the unethical habits of the fashion industry. In 2018 she won a Dutch Design Award. Since the work on the short film NOBU – a stylized portrait of her Japanese father – filmmaking became a place for Lisa to express narratives through fashion, and fashion became a tool for portraying deeply personal stories that speak to universal themes.